Changes at "WeDecide: How the Green Party of Canada learned to create Sustainable Policy through Continuous Proposal Development "

Description:
The Green Party of Canada (GPC) is a grassroots political organization that develops and promotes environmental sustainability, social justice, and economic policies that prioritize ecological health and social well-being.

It took four years, and several false starts, for the organization to adopt WeDecide to evolve a member-driven policy process from a two year physical meeting-centred process, to a fully online continuous process that has dramatically improved member participation and policy responsiveness. Decidim allowed the party to run an entirely transparent process, visible to the public at large, as a demonstration of participatory democracy in action.

The workshop will be an interactive discussion of the benefits, risks and challenges of moving a political party’s policy development onto the open internet, using decidim as a member portal for Continuous Policy Development and organizational transparency. The discussion will include operational and cultural aspects of change management.

Structure:

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   Green Party of Canada Case Study (70 minutes)

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     Continuous Online Policy Development, including

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     • Continuous Participatory Processes

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     • Multilingual amendments 

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     • Friendly-amendment Workshops

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     • Color-coded voting

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     • Formal dissents

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     Organizational Transparency

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     • Distributed Unit Self-Publishing

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     • Young Greens Engagement

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     • Running internal elections 

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     Organizational Change Management

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     • Strategies and lessons from the introduction of decidim to the organization

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     Decidim in Operational Workflows

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     • Meeting registrations with member authentication

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     Decidim as a Communications Strategy

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     • Policy development as a Search Engine Optimization strategy

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2. Question and Answer (20 minutes)

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Outcomes:

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• Review of new best practices for political policy development and member engagement

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• Identification of innovations to simply operations and increase adoption

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Language of the session: English

Logistical needs: Screen or projector

Number of people facilitating the workshop: 3, John Willson, WeDecide Technical Lead and GPC Fund President and Catherine Jones, Policy Lead and Federal Councillor